Your Guide To Buying ‘Real’ Honey And Saving The Bees

A recent investigation into honey fraud has revealed that some trusted popular honey brands sold in a number of Australian Supermarkets, don’t actually contain pure honey.

The report, produced by Quality Services International (QSI), a leading international scientific lab based in Germany that specialises in honey fraud detection, has found that almost half of the samples selected from supermarket shelves were “adulterated”, meaning they had been mixed with substances other than floral nectar.

According to food fraud experts, honey is one of the most commonly mislabelled food products around the world. Experts say that adulterated honey is bulked with substances such as rice syrup, corn syrup, sugar syrup, molasses, dextrose, glucose or any other similar product. Impure substances such as these are not often found in the tests required to pass food grade standards, yet the brands in question are claiming their product is 100 per cent honey.

Bee populations are in massive decline worldwide and the population of bees in Australia is down to about 50 per cent. Supporting honest, sustainable growers and producers is one of our biggest priorities here at The Source Bulk Foods. It’s right up there with educating you, our lovely customers, on the many things you can do to keep our planet thriving.

So, how do you avoid buying ‘fake’ honey? Well, that’s easy: buy honey from The Source Bulk Foods. Made from 100 per cent raw honey, our honey comes from happy bees located all around Australia – and we make sure of it.

Another way to avoid buying ‘fake’ honey, is by tracking down a bee keeper at your local farmers’ markets. A small backyard bee hive can produce up to 50 kilograms of honey per year – we’re certain they’d have a jar or two to spare!

Another thing you can do to save the bees, as Byron Smith, a landscape gardener and horticulturist, shares, is plant bee-friendly flowers in your garden. This includes a colourful mix of Alyssum, Basil, Borage, Caraway, Coriander, Cosmos, Dill, Marigolds, Radish, Clover, Gypsophila, Lucerne and more.

“In a world without bees, there will be massive food shortages, starvation and war over food. Bees pollinate 70 per cent of the world’s food crops — that means turning a flower into an edible fruit or vegetable so we can eat it. Grains like wheat and barley are wind-pollinated crops, but everything else requires bees,” Byron says.

More now than ever before, we need to give bees the respect they deserve for the work that they do. Choose real honey and plant bee-friendly seeds.